Hunterdon Art Museum assembles a collection of Kimberly Camp’s wildly imaginative dolls

Kimberly Camp’s “Alotta” is part of her “Cross River: A Parallel Universe” exhibition at The Hunterdon Art Museum.

If you would ever like to see an artist in action, observe a child with a doll. The child knows that the doll is different from the flesh-and-blood creatures that surround her. Nevertheless, it seems to her that the doll has a life — and the child will do what she can to augment and amplify that feeling. This is particularly true if she has made the doll herself. She will name it and bestow upon it a personality, and situate it in a land of her own invention. Doll play is an impressive achievement in world-building, and one that many of us lose the capacity for, as we leave childhood behind.

Not Kimberly Camp. The Camden-born, Collingswood-based creator has spent her adulthood indulging in brazen acts of imagination. Though she is celebrated for her painting, sculpture and museum leadership, she is probably best known for her dollmaking. Her dolls are, like each of us humans, one of a kind: fashioned by the artist out of varied materials and given a specific expression, personality, and stance.

Curators Judith K. Brodsky and Ferris Olin have honored a lifetime of doll-craft by calling to order a convention of figurines in the ground floor gallery of the Hunterdon Art Museum in Clinton. “Kimberly Camp — Cross River: A Parallel Universe” collects 40 years of work in beads, earthenware, stone, textile, faux fur and metal, all brought together by the artist to summon forth singular spirits.

What makes these figures recognizable as dolls rather than statues is the artist’s visible sense of play. There are serious overtones to all of her works and deep reverberations of our history, but even her most austere figures seem prepped for interaction. They are sturdy enough to absorb affection, portable enough to travel in a (large) suitcase, and solid enough to stand ward over a crib. These dolls could be a child’s best friend — or the companion of an open-minded adult. Camp and the curators have crowded the dolls together in groups and mounted others on the walls. From perches and platforms, scores of faces turn toward gallery visitors. They are welcoming you to a crowded party, but they are letting you know that they’ve got a lot to say.

Kimberly Camp’s “Chirp.”

But if Camp keeps one foot planted in an imaginary world, the other one is firmly in ours. “Cross River: A Parallel Universe” gives her an opportunity to flash her erudition and demonstrate that dollmaking is an international pursuit. Camp’s 3D characters are grounded in African sculpture, including the animal-headed Yoruba dolls and the shell-dotted Namji of Cameroon. But there are hints of other traditions, too: the questioning looks and flexible postures of Native American kachina dolls, the mystery and fragility of Japanese geisha dolls, and even the sleek commercial impassivity of those American Girls waiting for takers in boxes on the shelves of toy stores.

Camp’s work reminds us that dollmakers worldwide have always had a taste for the uncanny. A good doll needs to scare its owner a little. It is a protector, so it must be fearsome; it is a repository for anxieties, so it must be tough; it is a generator of dreams and fantasies, so it must scratch something into the unconscious of its animator.

Some of Camp’s dolls carry their defensive weaponry in plain sight. “Alotta,” for instance, is a cow of the Watusi breed, and that means it has got a pair of horns as thick as its snout. The earthenware doll stands upright on a pair of hooves. It wears a fur mantle and medallion around its shoulders and an expectant expression on its bovine face. Its head is tipped a little, as if it has asked a question and is now awaiting a reply. Both the skin of the doll and its attire are the matte black of activated charcoal.

Everything about the piece radiates dignity. This is a comrade well worth having, but not one that is going to brook any nonsense.

Kimberly Camp’s “The Second Wife.”

Camp’s bipedal cow invites affection and maybe even identification, but it isn’t something that encourages hugs. “The Second Wife,” by contrast, is as plush as the sculptor allows her characters to be. She is a human figure composed of white felt and ribbons, with wide-set, mournful eyes and a slight frown of bunched fabric. She has the forlorn look of a Raggedy Ann, but comes to us with an exposed breast (Camp’s rendering of the felt nipple is marvelously maternal) and a snake in her arms. Just as the Watusi evokes East African iconography, “The Second Wife” speaks of The Bible and ancient Near Eastern religion.

Legends and literature are all over “Cross River: A Parallel Universe.” Maybe this ought to be expected. Dolls are storytelling assistants: They are often squeezable realizations of heroes from books, poems and nursery rhymes. To a child, a physical representation of a character is proof of the deep truth of the tale.

Camp plays with that curious power — and sometimes expresses ambivalence about it. She decks out a raccoon in a dress made from pages of the notorious Little Black Sambo. African bead bracelets adorn its half-balled fists, and its brow is furiously furrowed.

Cowries dangle from the neck of “Brother Hound,” the raccoon’s hangdog neighbor. His tunic is the red, black and green of the pan-African flag, and it is adorned with words that connect American chattel slavery to the story of Exodus: “We were never slaves. We were enslaved. We have always defined ourselves.”

But mostly Camp revels in the richness of mythology and folk tales.

Kimberly Camp’s “Tanuki.”

She gives us a seated “Tanuki,” a Japanese trickster animal in clay and silk, a ribbon fan and a small kimono. Its head is turned from us and its eyes are recessed, but it still seems to be watching us out of its peripheral vision.

A doll version of “Dr. Buzzard,” the fabled Carolina hoodoo man, is almost as large as a child. He’s got High John the Conqueror root around his neck, a dried orange slice slung from his belt, pouches of medicinal powders, and a gaze toward the spirits. Camp clearly has as much fun dressing these dolls as she does when she is fashioning their bodies.

In the astonishing “Chirp” (birds are a recurring motif in this show), the little avian creature barely has any face at all, but its outfit is exquisitely crafted from hen feathers and tiny gemstones.

Many of these animal-headed figurines evoke the famous hybrids of the Egyptian pantheon. A solemn-faced sphinx plushie honoring Hatshepsut, the earliest female ruler of the Nile, greets visitors in the Museum lobby. These combinations of beast and human brethren situate us in a netherworld between the familiar and the supernatural — and that is exactly where dolls reside. They are intermediaries and guides for the imagination.

Kimberly Camp’s “Abiodun.”

Yet it is telling that many of the best pieces in “Cross River: A Parallel Universe” are the exhibition’s most realistic. Camp’s Immigration Series features miniature statues of African arrivals in the United States. “Abiodun” isn’t a fantastic creature or a flight of fancy inspired by a fairy tale: he is just a man, shaped lovingly from porcelain, and dressed in Malian mud cloth. The artist has rendered his body with extreme care, right down to delicate thumbs that are about the size of a sliver of long-grained rice.

He is looking back at us, as dolls do. There is openness in his expression, but he is wary, too.

Kimberly Camp wants you to treat him right, so she has made him tough to resist. Like every good dollmaker, she knows what she is doing. She understands the essence of the craft. She is making you a friend.

The Hunterdon Art Museum in Clinton will present “Kimberly Camp – Cross River: A Parallel Universe” through Jan. 12. Camp will also give a talk and dollmaking exhibition at the museum, Nov. 15 at 6 p.m.

Visit hunterdonartmuseum.org.